CRS
Chandler, Arizona, United States

There's an old saying. If you don't want someone to join a crowd, you ask them, "If everyone were jumping off of a cliff, would you?" Well, I have. So my answer would be "Yes". True story.
Profile continued . . .

ARCHIVES!
Let Me Geek Out About Carrie Brownstein For a Minute, Okay?

Tuesday, July 10, 2012

this entry brought to you modest mouse, "ocean breathes salty"


I swear to you, I normally do not feel this way about musicians.

I am not the kind of person who gets upset when his favorite band or musician gets popular. I am usually happy when my favorite bands get huge. In my opinion, I listen to the best type of music consistently, and the world would be better off if everybody listened to it. So when my favorite band blows up I think, for joy! Now everyone gets to enjoy this thing I love. Now we're all in my club!! To me it's not so much about exclusivity, it's about having more people to play with.

I suppose there have been a few bands here and there that have lost the magic when they made it big, but that's usually when a band starts to change their music more for the mainstream. But even in this case, this rarely happens to me. My favorite bands almost always get weirder and more experimental once they've gotten popular, almost as a reaction against their success. Nirvana's In Utero was a loud noisefest compared to Nevermind. Radiohead ditched their guitars and have steadily gone more towards bleeps and bloops ever since OK Computer. Modest Mouse appears to be getting grumpier and more noisy since they went to a major label. And who the hell knows what the hell Bjork is doing. I always like these weirder, more experimental albums more than their breakthroughs.

So it's really weird to me the way I feel about Carrie Brownstein.




Do you recognize that face? If not, that's because you don't have IFC or Netflix. She's the female co-star, along with Fred Armisen, of Portlandia. The show is fucking huge. Everybody loves it. I have not seen it yet. It's purely out of laziness; it's on Netflix streaming and I cannot wait to see it, but for the record I do not tend to watch much more than one show at any given time.

Here's the thing: I'm totally jealous that everybody loves my Carrie. But not that they love her, it's the way they love her.

If you like the show you may or may not have heard that Carrie was in a band. That band was called Sleater-Kinney, and you might not know it, but Sleater-Kinney were an incredibly influential, very vital indie rock band that not that many people know about, but was made up of two extremely important women of a movement called Riot Grrl, which is a movement you've also probably never heard of. Don't worry about it. The point is, it was important in the underground scene, and two people who had been in riot grrl bands, Corrin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein, made a band together. Sleater-Kinney was one of the most influential bands of the second-wave of riot grrl, which, unfortunately, is right when it dissolved as a movement, but its repercussions were massive for girl-rock bands.

And Carrie Brownstein fucking rocks. She's an excellent guitar player and although Sleater-Kinney was more punky and riff-heavy, on their later two albums and their last few tours, Carrie would shred your face off. Like a mother-fucking rockstar. She would throw herself around, jump, jump kick, high kick, and just generally rock like a god. I don't mean she's a good rock star "for a girl", I mean dude, you should have been there.

The thing is, when I saw Carrie had a show on television, I was super excited for her. I've long known about her sense of humor-- she has witty stage banter, she's had a blog on NPR, I've known for a while that she seems really witty and fun. And again, the more people in my club, the more people I get to play with.

But then the show blew up. And I hear her on the radio being interviewed, I see her in blogs, I hear people talking about her on the street. And they all know her for her comedy and that's it. "She's so funny", they say. "I love that one character of hers!" they say.

And I can't help but feel jealous. You can love Carrie Brownstein all you want. I don't mind sharing her. But. You have to love her for the things I love her for.
-----



with love from CRS @ 10:09 AM 

0 Comments:

Post a Comment